[OP-ED]: Stand up Against Trump’s Dark Ages

It is sad and painful and terrifying: The country’s first black president will have to hand over the White House to a white supremacist.

No, it is not a nightmare. Or rather, yes, it is, even though, hopefully, we will be wide awake and alert the next four years.

The Make America Great Again carnival barker bamboozled just enough people into making him President despite –and in more cases than one would like to admit, because of—his racist, misogynistic, xenophobic ravings and promises.

Even more worrisome, Republicans will control Congress, allowing Donald Trump to push ahead his destructive agenda. In what sounds like an episode of The Walking Dead, the president-elect plans to bring back to life a sorry parade of corrupt political corpses such as Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and, believe or not, Sarah Palin. Already the stench is sickening.

“Dawn is breaking on this new, dark world and people are finally seeing what others knew all along,” wrote in Facebook Puerto Rican journalist Susanne Ramírez de Arellano. “There are two Americas. This is not the Tale of Two Cities, this is the telltale heart of an angry, racist America that has been seething under the perfumed surface, and has now come to pillage what they have always believed should be theirs.”

You can repeat until you are blue in the face that a peaceful transition of power is what democracy is all about, but the sight of Trump sitting with Barack Obama at the White House was disturbing enough as to make one wonder if this is really democracy. After all, the president-elect, a shameless liar supported and celebrated by neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

“[…] let me be clear: Businessman Donald Trump was a bigot. Candidate Donald Trump was a bigot. Republican nominee Donald Trump was a bigot. And I can only assume that President Donald Trump will be a bigot,” wrote Charles M. Blow a New York Times columnist.

Any illusions about a “new” Trump after he called Obama “a very good man” last Thursday, were dispelled when he went back to his lying ways and accused in a tweet the thousands people across the country chanting “Not my president” of being “professional protesters.”

“Just had a very open and successful presidential election,” Trump tweeted. “Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

Latinos –and not only undocumented --should expect the next four years to be rough. Trump has promised to turn back the clock on every progressive Obama measure.

To begin with Trump and his far right wing cohorts are intent on revoking Obamacare even though they have nothing to replace it with. Unconscionably millions of people --a great number of them Latinos -- would be left again without health coverage.

Obama’s executive orders on immigration are also in Trump’s crosshairs. Abolishing them could be the beginning of the mass arrests, detentions and deportations he promised in the campaign, along with building the infamous Mexico border wall.

Diplomatic relations with Cuba would also be in danger if Trump fulfills the campaign promises he made to some of the most reactionary Miami Cuban-American groups.

No, the near future is not promising for immigrants, women, Muslims, gays, the disabled etc. These are times of resistance, not sheepish acceptance. After the nightmare passes –and it will- it will be up to the people who were never part of the cold, dark Trump’s new world, to revive compassion and human rights.